Author Bio:
Tom Rieger is the author of the best-selling book, Breaking the Fear Barrier, as well as the upcoming book, Curing Organizational Blindness. He has over 30 years’ experience working with organizations in both the private and public sector to help them reach their full potential, and is considered to be a pioneer in the study and science of organizational barriers to success. He is currently President of NSI, Inc., as well as their commercial-facing entity, NBI. Both companies leverage the latest research in social and behavioral science to tackle some of the most pressing and difficult problems faced by governments and companies, across a variety of industries.
Description:
Stress. Impending deadlines. Pressure to perform. Interdepartmental conflict. Fear of failure.
In the workplace, these characteristics are the new normal. If your team fails, the consequences can be severe, and in some cases, permanent.
To succeed, you need to quickly cut through the clutter to compile the information you think you need, align your team, and sell your decision. But when emotions are running high, and when faced with constant pressure from the threat of failure, our instinctive desire to Simplify, Unify, and Justify makes us vulnerable to certain deadly traps, that can speed an entire organization toward failure. At times, catastrophic failure. Especially when our emotions prevent us from seeing the entire picture, send us into a tribal mindset where objections and competing ideas are viewed with hostility, or cause us to act more like a used car salesman making a pitch than an impartial judge evaluating the facts, sometimes without even realizing we are doing it.
In our intense desire to reach our personal or local goals, we inadvertently risk becoming blind to a more objective version of the truth.
We act this way because it is how our brains are wired. Balancing our instincts with a more open, objective, and inclusive approach starts with an awareness of how we think and act, and how to recognize when we are falling prey to the most common blindspots that influence our decisions. Knowing how to recognize those traps, and having easy-to-implement strategies for avoiding them, is the key to curing organizational blindness.
